CNBC’s Pearson is retiring next month

CNBC chairman Mark Hoffman and senior vice president and editor in chief of business news Nik Deogun sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:

After a sterling 23-year career at CNBC, Hampton Pearson, a mainstay of our news coverage from Washington, D.C., has decided to retire, effective June 15.

We will all miss Hampton greatly, not just for his even-handed reporting and authoritative delivery, but also because in the hyper-competitive news business, Hampton has always been a perfect gentleman, willing to take on any assignment.

Hampton joined CNBC in 1995 from WBZ in Boston, where he focused on politics. During his tenure at CNBC, Hampton was a pillar of our 1996 election coverage, subsequently reporting on the Clinton White House. He then closely followed the Microsoft anti-trust case and has been our point person on the Supreme Court and other big business cases ever since. (We are hoping the judge decides the AT&T-Time Warner case before June 15!)

Long before TV cameras were allowed inside the Federal Reserve, Hampton spent years in the basement of the Treasury Department reporting on the interest rate moves — via telephone.

Of course, for the past 20 years, Hampton has become synonymous with the monthly jobs report and has made that 8:30 am announcement on the first Friday of every month one of the highlights of our coverage.

We want to thank Hampton for being a great colleague and friend over the years. The Washington Bureau will toast Hampton closer to his departure date. In the meantime, please join us in wishing him all the very best as he relocates to Scottsdale, AZ.

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

This website is operated by Chris Roush, who teaches “Writing and Reporting,” “Business Reporting,” “Economics Reporting,” and “Business and the Media” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.